[Tom Otley]

BA comment:
We are continuing to work hard to restore all of our IT systems and are aiming to operate a near normal schedule at Gatwick and the majority of services from Heathrow on Sunday.

We are extremely sorry for the huge disruption caused to customers throughout Saturday and understand how frustrating their experiences will have been.

We are refunding or rebooking customers who suffered cancellations on to new services as quickly as possible and have also introduced more flexible rebooking policies for anyone due to travel on Sunday and Monday who no longer wishes to fly to/from Heathrow or Gatwick.

We would advise customers travelling to continue checking the status of their flight on our website, http://www.ba.com before coming to the airport.

[nevereconomy]

At 7.30 this morning the most recent update on website was from 23.30 yesterday. In my company a crisis like this would have had
every senior member of staff up all night getting it sorted. Oh for the old days when there was a properly manned flight connections center and huge unseen backup staff, all of whom we properly trained, to rebook everyone affected ! Of course that
kind of “excess” staffing no longer has a place at BA. I am also puzzled that BA (and Delta and United, too from their experiences)an organization utterly reliant on their IT, appear to have no real backup/parallel systems in place to cope with this kind of eventuality.

[SimonS1]

So what are the odds on BA trying to benefit here in some way.

Declining EU261 claims on some spurious ‘exceptional circumstances’ grounds
Take 3 months to pay people back for cancelled flights
Rejecting ‘duty of care’ claims to try and save money

Every time I come on here and see the ‘British Airways the world’s most successful airline’ thread listed I almost wet myself laughing.

[MartynSinclair]

The people I feel really sorry for are those passengers that are travelling with family and children on a family holiday. The fall out goes well beyond the cost of the flights – in some cases passengers will have lost ‘work holiday time’, children will be distraught.

What gets me is when Snr Cruz says he understands the frustration and apologizes … no…. I don’t think he does understand the distress that families go through when flights are cancelled and the extended fall out…

[capetonianm]

I am sitting at LGW where traffic appears remarkably normal. I suspect LHR is rather different.

BA have already left it too late late to come out of this with any honour.

[LuganoPirate]

Luckily I’m not affected, but the amounts mentioned for taxi and hotel in the letter are unrealistic.
£ 50 return will not get you a taxi from the airport to town and back in many European destinations or in NY for that.
£ 200 per couple will not get you a decent room in Zurich and if alone, just £100 might get you a bed in the Salvation Army hostel! (OK, that’s a bit exaggerated, but still) And ceratinly not in New York.
Ditto for meal expenses.

But it’s not just that. What about all the people on transit visas not allowed to enter the UK? I guess they’ll have to bed down on the airport floor?

Of course suspected power outages = events beyond our control = EU261 get out clause, though I suspect this may well not work as it won’t be too hard to prove it was within their control, but ensuring better backup options etc.

I think this will be very very costly for BA/IAG but great for the claims processing firms! Will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

[rferguson]

As I said earlier in this thread the root cause is the continuous cost cutting. The decision to outsource the entire IT department was a bad one. When it was announced many staff said this exact thing would happen.

Saying that….and to add a bit of balance.

Firstly on the subject of compensation. I can only speak from my own experience and have only claimed once as a commercial passenger (from CPH-LHR tech aircraft). I put the claim into ba.com on the Saturday and was emailed on Monday to say that the cheque was in the post. I was impressed. I will compare this to my recent claim to Finnair. After two weeks of no reply I called the call centre to enquire when I should expect a reply and was told ‘in about six weeks’. Poor.
The letter BA handed affected customers already spelt out clearly the compensation that they would be entitled to and informing them to go get a hotel and transport for BA to reimburse. I’d expect that amounts to an admission of liability.

Secondly – people talk of contingency plans (or lack there of). I think in an ideal world some imagine that there is this secret army of 1000 staff that are kept in a stock room somewhere in the depths of T5 or the call centres just to wheel out in the even of this kind of thing. Obviously that is not the case. We all know that there has been a relentless drive towards automation – check in, baggage drop, even some gates now. The number of staff available yesterday would have been the amount of staff rostered for a normal busy Bank Holiday Weekend with some extra management grades on days off that can be drafted in to help in the terminal. It is a chaotic. It is sad to see peoples holidays being ruined.

[Malta mann]

[quote quote=809541]Did somebody in the corporate comms team suggest he should wear a hiviz in the middle of a call centre? Is it supposed to make him look more hands on? Dear me…..

[/quote]

ROFL

[canucklad]

Esselle you’re spot on regarding the hi viz vest. I’d rather he’d been seen in his Saville Row suit exposing his high wage and thus his ultimate accountability to yet another break down in BA’s front end processes and in the process exposing their shear inability to manage a crisis without the need to slam the doors shut.
Oh,and I did hear one interview link this to the tragic events earlier in the week, subtlety suggesting passengers should be thankful and just get on with it.
At least Mr Cruz had the decency to rule out cyber crime, thus accepting the blame. Although if it’s an outsourcing issue in Mumbai or Bangalore I wonder if BA will attempt to avoid compensation by following that particular route of abdication.

[MartynSinclair]

http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/08/technology/delta-airline-computer-failure/index.html

Interesting that Delta used the same excuse – Power Outage..

I wonder whether the airlines speak to each other as they will all be affected by each others “power outages”

[AnthonyDunn]

It is highly revealing that BA has declined, to date, to identify the location and source of its “power outage”. Also that, to date, BA has conspicuously failed to put up anyone as a spokes(wo)man to offer explanations or answer questions from the meedjah. The defensiveness of their “response” (or lack of) speaks volumes.

Senior Management and I are en route to MAA and CMB next weekend. What are the odds that this will still be reverberating then? I’m already thinking of workarounds.

[Swissdiver]

There is some good old BA bashing in the thread…

Is it linked to cost cutting? Not sure Indian IT people are worse than British ones. Will they refuse to compensate? I don’0t think so, as Mr. Ferguson noted. And actually they lodged and fed passengers when possible. For me, the main issue yesterday was a lack of communication. Given the fact BA relies on its IT to communicate any flight disruption, this actually does’t come as a surprise.

So here we are, with the only real question: Please BA define precisely what is it you called “power outage”?

[rferguson]

AnthonyDunn i’m not sure BA management are even certain of what happened yesterday. This is what a friend in ops management and on duty told me yesterday.

– some systems started to go down before 06:00
– FLY (check in system) failed around two hours later.
– we were still able to generate load sheets for about another four hours so able to get some flights away
– the intranet went down so we couldn’t communicate via email with each other. Some of the fixed line phone systems followed. Then the terminal tannoy system. Crew could not check updated rosters. Communication was almost impossible.
– A little while later more critical systems including the one that generates flight plans failed and then it became impossible to get aircraft away.

I’ve got ZERO idea about IT systems but it dazzles me how so many varied systems could fail in succession.

[nevereconomy]

referguson has some good points,but this seems to be an acceptance that, given the economic and technological factors prevalent in the industry, we have to accept this kind of fiasco as inevitable. The big question here is whether they even had a plan for such an eventuality – given the results, it clearly was inadequate, if it even existed.

[ImissConcorde]

I feel sorry for the front line customer facing staff. Most of them are now on “new enhanced” contracts (i.e. on a par with supermarket check out staff) It sounds like they had no leadership on Saturday and were powerless to help customers. I wonder how many will decide not to return?

[Author]

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